Why is Safari so awful?

[ChrisA]

I always wonder why some people have so much trouble with software that works perfectly for 99% of the users. What makes these people have trouble? What are they doing?

Many times I've seen people blame the wrong things. Some say "the computer is slow" what really it is the internet connection that is having problems. Other times I've seen a partially failing hard disk that had to do many re-tries and the computer would hang and of course they blame whatever software they happen to be running.

I've yet to hear a complaint where someone has tested the "bad" software on multiple computers, using all different Internet connections and has good solid statistics. It is easy to be fooled by the statistics of small numbers.

 

[nitromac]

I always wonder why some people have so much trouble with software that works perfectly for 99% of the users. What makes these people have trouble? What are they doing?

Many times I've seen people blame the wrong things. Some say "the computer is slow" what really it is the internet connection that is having problems. Other times I've seen a partially failing hard disk that had to do many re-tries and the computer would hang and of course they blame whatever software they happen to be running.

I've yet to hear a complaint where someone has tested the "bad" software on multiple computers, using all different Internet connections and has good solid statistics. It is easy to be fooled by the statistics of small numbers.

My internet connection is completely fine, and my computer is far more than capable of handling web browsing. Safari on iPhone has never had any problems in my 3 years of owning iPhones. I don't see why the same isn't the case for my MBP.

I do want to point out that Chrome gave me a few black boxes on youtube today as well, on a totally different PC (Windows). That might be a website issue.

But the whiting-out text is definitely not. (and is the most annoying)

 

[ChrisA]

My internet connection is completely fine, and my computer is far more than capable of handling web browsing....

Read the text you quoted. How many Macbooks have you tried this on (only yours or several others?) how many different internet service providers and have to done a statistically valid number of tests giving you reasonable confidence numbers?

In other words, so far, the best explanation is "something is wrong with your setup. It is broken". See if the problem exists on other computers and if so on what fraction of them.

I recenty fixed a crashing audio app. It turns out when the app made a certain API call the Appple library routine did acheck on all installed AU type plug-ins and one of them that was installed years ago was "bad" on the newer version of Mac OS X. Took me a long time to figure it out and I have 30 years of experience with software development. This exact thing is not what is causing your problem but I bet it is something like it, something seemingly unrelated to Safari that is "different" on your system that exposes a bug. Could be "anything" and it might be impossible to find. But I bet if you do random tesing on other macBooks you will never be able to reproduce it.

 

[ParsiKade]

Safari's my favorite browser, I'm using a 2011 MBP and haven't had any of those problems you mentioned. I had some problems using Safari 5 but version 6 is much better, I think you should check your settings and see if you have changed your preferences on Safari. (LOL dictation is good )

 

[nancyfromafrica]

I have used safari on windows and felt that it lagged some functionalities but overall it was better than opera and ie

 

[aliensporebomb]

Wait a second....

When was the last time you upgraded Adobe Flash?
When was the last time you upgraded Java?
When was the last time you upgraded Silverlight?

 

[turtlez]

Things I have noticed that make safari my fav are, disabling java.

 

[vanc]

A long time Chrome user. Since rMBP with Safari 6, I switched over on rMBP. It feels smoother than Chrome (tried release, beta and canary builds, still keep them in the system).

I hated Safari before version 6. Now it's much more better.

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Still using Chrome on Linux and Windows, though. It's the best.